74-Minute Album Released on Floppy Disk

Music Thing has the goods on the latest album from Batch Totem, released exclusively on 3.5-inch floppy disk:

The audio is encoded in the GSM 6.10 WAV format [used to compress speech in GSM mobile phones] at various bitrates the disk holds 74 minutes of audio, that can be played on a computer with standard audio-players like Winamp, Windows Media Player and Itunes without any external codec installed." The music has been created specially for the format, (or as he put is "composed directly in the spectral domain") He says: "On certain tracks the amplitude and low bitrates produce 'ghost' frequencies according to the Nyquist theorem, and the algorithm of the audio codec meaning that very high frequencies and white noise can occur at very low bitrates. Using listening equipment with a subwoofer is recommended."

There's even a free sample track that I look forward to listening to once my brain chemistry finds a place where low bit-rate music sounds appealing.

4 Responses to “74-Minute Album Released on Floppy Disk”

This is just what the world needs, no really, a practical (if artistic, oh, I’m going to irk my fellow Philosophy Majors with that one) use for all those old floppy disks. They ought to have a word for this, like afro-cycling or something, since it reminds me of the sort of strange repurposing of old goods that I so frequently see done in developing nations. …but really, a floppy disk is made of several metal parts, 2 kinds of plastic, paper, glue… you can’t just melt it down to recycle it, so better a music album than a landfill. If readers like this, I wager they’ll enjoy OneBitMusic.com – no affiliation.

GSM 6.10? At first, I thought: Maybe that form of delivery is the perfect fit for their artistic concept and realising that was a stroke of genious, but I’m not impressed, not at all. You see, over 10 years ago, we had multiple albums on one floppy disk, any 386 could play them (computers actually had floppy drives back then), and if you had the right sound card, you could get full CD quality.

So, I was feeling quite smug … for about half a minute. Then it hit me that they did not in fact compose and record some sounds and compress them into utter shittyness to make the GSM WAV, no, the score they wrote is the WAV file, and the codec that converts it into sound waves on your computer is the instrument that plays this score! Very cool. Now I fucking hate them for beating me to something I’ve wanted to do for ages (in a qutie different form, though), but anyways, very cool.

Ã€ pro pos codec: QuickTime Player produced some sounds on my computer from the demo track, but not the ones that would have been intended. VLC refused to even try. MPlayer did the trick. So, if you have no Windows machine with WMP at hand, try MPlayer. (You might have to add a ‘.wav’ extension to the file to make the program eat it.)